Minimal Lighting Blog

I just heard about this - Strobist is a blog by a pro photographer about how to make due with small flash units instead of investing in studio-type units that are big and heavy. It's worth checking out.

What Not to See (in the Viewfinder)

When in the throes of shooting, you can get carried away and miss things that will make your picture look bad, Here's a quick list of what can be problems and ways to solve them:

• Busy backgrounds can distract from your subject and draw someone's eye away. Try shifting your position relative to the subject, getting the subject to move or using selective focus to blur the background.


• Scenes often have natural horizontal and vertical lines - like a tree or the horizon. If you work in haste, you can make them look tilted, causing the whole scene to seem odd. Line the horizontal or vertical lines up with the edges of your viewfinder to get closer to level. If you do make a mistake, fix this in your image editing program.


• Tip a camera and look up or down or along something's side, and you'll find that formerly parallel lines will start to meet. You can just be careful or use something called a perspective correcting lens, which is generally expensive. However, your image editor should let you stretch things back more or less to normal.


• Iif two things are close to the same shade, they may blend into each other. This can lead to some pretty funny things, like having a person in a black turtleneck in front of a black background and getting a picture of a floating head. Your choices are to increase the lighting on one of the objects, moving the subject in front of something else, getting the subject to change clothes, or use your digital darkroom to change the image contrast enough to separate the two.


• If you're in a hurry to take someone's photo, you can inadvertently become a surgeon and lop off some part of the body or head. If you do it to a great enough degree, you could try to bluff your way out and call it artistic. Otherwise, pay attention when looking through the viewfinder.


• You can also become a Dr. Frankenstein and add things that nature never intended. Juxtapositions between subjects, foreground, and background can make for some odd effects, like the telephone pole behind your cousin Rita that will look as though it's growing out of her head. You'll need to move yourself or the subject or be ready for some intensive computer work to actually retouch significant portions of the picture[md]possible, but a big pain in the shutter finger. If the pole actually is growing out of her head, there's probably nothing I can do for you. Or her.

Another Digital Photo Basic: White Balance

If you've ever noticed how your home's lighting can seem positively amber when you've just come in from outdoors, then you have a grasp of why white balance is important in digital photography.

All light is made of many different colors and it falls in a spectrum from deep blues to reds. (Think of a rainbow.) Often, there's a bias toward one color or another. For example, candlelight is yellow compared to tungston bulbs, which lean far more toward the warm (or red/yellow) end than sunlight. Light on a cloudy day is bluer than what you get in direct sun.

As the quality of the light changes, so does the appearance of colors, much as your clothing will look different when you are under some sort of colored light. White balance is the digital equivalent of indoor versus outdoor film. If you want a realistic representation of colors under different lighting conditions, then you need to take into account how the tint of the lighting affects what you see.

So you need to set the white balance of your camera to match the prevaling conditions. There is an automatic setting, but that can get confused by light reflected by colored surfaces, or it may be that you want to deliberately set the white balance to get a warmer or cooler sense to the image. Some cameras will let you take a reading from a white surface and then adjust the color perception so that the object actually comes out white, and not an amber or bluish color.

You will need to reconsider the white balance every time the light changes. That could mean moving indoors from outdoors, or visa versa, or even moving into a shaded area outside when you were in full sunlight. Just remember - if something goes wrong, this is a setting that you can adjust if you set your camera to save RAW images, and not JPEGs.

Book Review: Low Budget Shooting

When I requested a review copy of Low Budget Shooting: Do It Yourself Solutions to Professional Photo Gear by German photographer and designer Cyrill Harnischmacher, I was hoping to see something useful. I was first taken aback by the thinness of the volume - 72 pages with a hardback cover and paper thickness that only seemed to emphasize the lack of wider content. And yet when I flipped through, I realized that the $19.95 price was something a photographer could recoup multiple times in a single project. Just learning to create a custom soft box out of maybe $10 or $20 worth of material - without needing much in the way of skills or tools - is a money saver. You can learn to pretty easily make reflectors of all sizes, diffusers for a hand-held flash unit, even a table with continuous background for shooting products. There seems to be a bias toward table-top and close-up work, but the techniques he suggests are actually a jumping-off point. For example, you could adapt the soft box construction to a studio flash, or even series of flashes, or create large area reflectors using thin PVC pipes instead of fiberglass tubing. If you have the slightest inclination toward do-it-yourself projects, then this will give you great suggestions for building and improvising a lot of your own equipment without going broke in the process.